Geographic Medicine

Schmidt Number: S-3433

On-line since: 15th July, 2005

Lecture I

Knowledge
of the Supersensible and Riddles of the Human Soul

A public lecture given in
St. Gallen, November 15, 1917

Anyone who follows the
evolution of the human spirit over the course of centuries, or
perhaps millenia, will come to feel that this human spirit moves on
to ever new achievements in the realm of knowing and in the realm of
doing. There is no need to place too much emphasis on the word
progress, for in the dismal time that has now befallen humanity this
might call forth bitter doubt in many. If we observe this evolution
of the human spirit, however, something else makes a clear impression
on us, namely, that the forms and configurations taken by man's
striving spirit vary essentially from century to century. And since
today in our studies we are chiefly concerned with a striving for
knowledge that wishes to penetrate humanity's evolution in a new way,
we need only bear in mind, by way of example, how such conceptions,
which are to some extent in conflict with the old ones, have
difficulty gaining access to evolving humanity.

We should continually
recall, for example, how difficult it was to bring the Copernican
world view into people's habits of thought, habits of feeling —
indeed, in certain realms this took centuries. This Copernican world
view had broken with what people for a long time believed necessary
to maintain as the truth about the structure of the universe on the
basis of their sense perception. Then came the time when a person
could no longer rely on what the eye saw as the rising and setting of
the sun, as the sun's movement. He had to accept that, contrary to
the visual appearance, the sun in a certain way, at least in its
relation to the earth, stands still. Human habits of thought and
feeling did not easily accommodate themselves to such sudden
reversals of knowledge.

In the
anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to which our
considerations this evening are devoted, we have to do with an even
greater reversal of this kind. Those who believe themselves convinced
on firm scientific grounds of the content of this spiritual science
also believe it necessary for it to have a decisive influence now and
in the further evolution of human thinking, sensing, and feeling. It
could also be said, if you will allow me these few
introductory words, that the introduction of something like the
Copernican world view was a matter of dealing with countless
prejudices, with traditional opinions. People believed that if
anything else were to supersede these it would upset all kinds of
religious conceptions and things of that kind.

Many other objections
concerning what we are to discuss this evening get in the way. Here
the problem is not simply the prejudices such as those that
confronted the Copernican theory, for example. In this case there is
also the problem that in our time many people, indeed the majority of
those considering themselves enlightened and cultured, not only bring
with them their prejudices and preconceptions; they are actually
ashamed of having to take seriously the realm about which
anthroposophy has to speak. Such an individual feels he has to
apologize not only to the world in general but to himself if he
admits that it is possible to know about the things that are to be
spoken of today in as thoroughly scientific a way as about the outer
structure of nature. He believes that he has to regard himself as
foolish or childish.

These things must be
considered if we are to speak today about an anthroposophically
oriented spiritual science. Anyone speaking out of knowledge of this
science knows the objections that must arise today by the hundreds
and thousands. He already knows these objections, because doubt is
felt today not only concerning the specific truths and results of
this spiritual science; there is also doubt that knowledge of any
kind can be acquired concerning the realm with which anthroposophy
occupies itself. The possibility of developing conceptual beliefs in
the soul, general conceptual beliefs about the realm of the eternal,
is certainly still acknowledged as justified by many today; but it is
generally considered something dreamy or sentimental to believe that
a really factual knowledge can be developed about the facts that can
be drawn from the sense world concerning the immortal and eternal in
the nature of the human being. This is particularly the case among
those who believe themselves to be forming their judgments out of the
presently recognized mode of scientific conception.

This evening we will
have nothing to do with the dreamy and sentimental. We will rather be
dealing with a realm in which you could say that the student,
particularly the scientific student, shrinks from its first
conditions. I would like to touch very briefly on the fact that this
anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has no wish to be
sectarian. It is completely misunderstood by anyone who believes that
it wishes to arise in the way some new kind of religious faith is
founded. It has no such wish. It wishes to arise today as a necessary
result of the world view brought by natural scientific development, a
general, publicly accepted conception among the widest circles of
humanity. This natural scientific development today supplies so many
concepts, which are in their turn the source of feelings and
sensations. It provides the concepts for the most widely held world
view. This natural scientific mode of observation sets itself the
task of examining and explaining what is yielded to the outer senses,
of examining what is accessible to human understanding by way of the
natural laws about facts given to the outer senses.

If only one takes a
quick look at what is living, it is possible to see how everywhere
today natural science must consider origins, going back to what the
construction of the seed reveals concerning growing, becoming,
flourishing. (Though this is more prevalent in other realms, it is
most clearly apparent in the realm of the living.) If the natural
scientist wishes to explain animal life or human life in this sense,
he goes back to birth, he studies embryology, he studies that from
which growing and becoming evolve. The natural scientist returns to
birth, to the beginning of what unfolds before the senses. And when
natural science seeks an explanation for the world, it goes back with
various hypotheses — with the foundations laid by geology,
paleontology, with what the individual branches of natural science
can reveal — forming conceptions out of this about the birth of
the universe's structure, you could say. Even if one or another may
have doubts about the justification for such a way of thinking, it is
always being striven for.

The thoughts are well
known that people have presented in order to fathom, if not the
beginning of earthly evolution, at least far distant epochs (those
epochs, for example, before the human being walked the earth) in
order to explain in some way out of what went before, out of what lay
in a germinal state, what follows, the consequences that the human
being takes in of his surroundings through his senses. The whole
Darwinian theory, or, if one wishes to leave that aside, the theory
of evolution, is based on the search for origins, looking for the
emergence of something out of something else, I would say that
everywhere we find this thought of going back to youth and birth for
explanations.

Spiritual science in
the anthroposophical sense finds itself in another position. And by
its point of departure it calls forth a vague opposition. Opposition
without people being conscious of it; one could say that it calls
forth an unconscious opposition, an instinctive opposition. Such
opposition is often much more effective than the opposition that is
clearly recognized, clearly thought through. In order to arrive at
conceptions at all, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science
must not begin now with general, hazy concepts of spirit; to arrive
at spiritual facts, it must make death its starting point. It thereby
stands from the outset, you could say, in fundamental opposition to
what is preferred today, namely to proceeding from birth, youth,
growth, and the progress of development. Death encroaches upon life.
And if you keep in touch with contemporary scientific literature, you
can find everywhere that the conscientious scientist holds the view
that death as such cannot be inserted in the series of natural
scientific concepts in the same sense as other concepts.

The spiritual
scientist must make death his actual starting point, death, the
cessation, actually the opposite of birth. How death and all that is
related to it encroaches upon life in the widest sense is the basic
question. Death terminates what is perceptible to the senses; death
dissolves what is becoming, what is developing before the senses. By
the way that death encroaches on life, it can be conceived of as
having no part in what is working and flourishing here in the sense
world, springing forth and producing life. This is what yields the
opinion that nothing can be known about what is concealed by death,
as it were, cloaked by death. (Within certain limits this opinion is
perfectly comprehensible, though totally unjustifiable.) And it is
actually from this corner of human feeling that the objections rear
up their heads, objections that obviously can be brought up against
things that are the results of a science still in its youth today.
For spiritual science is young, and for precisely these reasons just
referred to, the spiritual scientist is in quite a different position
from that of the natural scientist, even when speaking about things
in the sphere of his own research. The spiritual scientist cannot
proceed in exactly the same way as the natural scientist, who poses
some fact and then proves it on grounds by which everyone is
convinced: that it can be seen. The spiritual scientist, however,
speaks about what cannot be perceived by the senses. Hence, in
speaking about the results of his research, he is always obliged to
indicate how such results can be reached.

There is a rich
literature concerning the realm about which I will be speaking with
you this evening. Believing themselves called upon to do so, critics
constantly raise the objection when reading my writings, for example,
that the spiritual scientist maintains such and such a thing but
gives no proof, although this actually shows only how superficially
things are read! He does offer proof, but in a different way. To
begin with, he tells how he arrived at his results; he must first
indicate the path into the realm of facts. This path is generally
unknown, because it is not the customary one for today's habits of
thinking and feeling. It must first be said that the spiritual
investigator is forced by his investigation to conclude that with the
methods and procedures by which the ordinary scientist comes to his
brilliant results (not rejected by the spiritual scientist but
admired) we do not arrive at the super-sensible. It is precisely this
experience, namely, the very limitations of the methods of natural
scientific thinking, from which the spiritual scientist makes his
start. This is not done, however, in the way so prevalent today,
which is to declare that certain things, beyond which the ordinary
scientist does not go, are the limits of human cognition. No, it is
done in such a way that an attempt is made to come to definite
experiences that can be attained only at these limits. I have spoken
about these boundaries to human cognition particularly in my most
recent written work, Riddles of the Soul.

Those people who have
not taken knowledge as something that falls into their laps from
outside, those who have wrestled with knowledge, wrestled with truth,
have always at least certain experiences at these limits of human
cognition. Here it must be noted that times change, that the
evolution of humanity undergoes changes. Not so very long ago, the
most outstanding thinkers and those struggling for knowledge, when
they stood before boundaries of this kind, thought that one cannot go
beyond these boundaries, that one must remain there. Those of you in
the audience who have often heard me speak here know how little it is
my habit to touch on personal matters. When the personal has a
connection in any way with the question under consideration, however,
one may venture to refer to it briefly. I may say that what I have to
say about experiences of this sort at the boundaries of cognition is
the result of more than thirty years of spiritual research. And it
was more than thirty years ago that these very problems, these tasks,
these riddles that arise at the boundaries of cognition, made a
significant impression on me.

From the many examples
that can be cited about such boundaries, I would like to take one
that has been referred to by a real wrestler with knowledge,
Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the famous aesthetician who was also a
philosopher of distinction, though perhaps little known during his
lifetime and soon forgotten. A decade or so ago Friedrich Theodor
Vischer wrote a very interesting treatise about a book, also very
interesting, written by Volkelt concerning dream fantasies. Friedrich
Theodor Vischer, in the course of this treatise, touched on a variety
of subjects of no further interest to us here. But I would like to
quote one sentence, a sentence that may perhaps be passed over in
reading but a sentence that can pierce like lightning into the human
heart and soul when these are permeated by a striving for knowledge,
a true inner striving for knowledge. It is the sentence that burst
upon Vischer when he was reflecting, meditating upon the nature of
the human soul. Out of what he had gleaned about the human being from
contemporary natural science, he deduced that the human soul cannot
be merely in the body; this much is clear; but it is just as clear
that it cannot be outside the body.

Here we have a
complete contradiction, a contradiction that cannot easily be
resolved. It is a contradiction that poses itself with immutable
necessity if an individual is wrestling for knowledge in all earnest.
Vischer was not yet able for the time was not sufficiently ripe
— to press on from what we might call his position in
knowledge, at these boundaries of knowledge, to press on from
cognition in the ordinary sense of the word to inward experience of a
contradiction of this kind. Yet from all directions today, from the
most knowledgeable people, we hear a particular conclusion when they
come up against such a contradiction. (There are indeed hundreds and
hundreds of such contradictions du Bois-Reymond a physiologist of
great intelligence, has spoken about only seven world riddles, but
these seven can be multiplied by hundreds.) Our contemporary man of
knowledge says that from this point on human cognition is able to go
no further. He says this for the simple reason that at the boundaries
of human cognition he cannot determine to go on from mere thinking,
from mere mental activity, to experience.

It is necessary to
begin at a place where such a contradiction obstructs the way, a
contradiction not ingeniously thought out but one that is revealed by
the riddle of the world; we must seek to live with such a
contradiction again and again, to wrestle with it in everyday life,
to immerse the soul in it entirely. We must have no fear while
immersing ourselves in this contradiction (and a certain inner
courage of thought is part of this), we must have no fear that this
contradiction will be able to split asunder the conceptual powers of
the soul, or that the soul will not be able to penetrate through it,
and so on. I have described this very struggle at such boundaries in
detail in my book, Riddles of the Soul.

When an individual
comes to such a boundary with his whole soul, instead of with mere
mental images, with mere clever thinking and mental strategies, he
progresses further. He does not go further on a purely logical path,
however, but on the path of living knowledge. I would like to
describe what he experiences by means of a comparison, for the paths
of the spiritual investigator are really experiences of knowledge,
facts of knowledge. Language today has not yet acquired many words
for these things, because words have been coined for what is acquired
by outer sense perception. Hence what stands clearly before the eye
of the spirit can often be expressed only by means of comparison.
When we live into such contradictions, we feel as if we were at the
border where the spiritual world breaks in; this is not to be found
in sense-perceptible reality, where indeed it breaks in but does so
from outside, as it were.

Now, whether or not
this image is well-founded from a natural scientific point of view is
not important here, for it can still be used by way of comparison. It
is as if one of the lower forms of life had not yet developed the
sense of touch but experienced only inwardly, experienced itself
inwardly in constant stirrings of movement, in this way experiencing
the borders of the physical world, the surfaces of single objects. A
being that has not yet developed the sense of touch and experiences
only the surfaces of sense-perceptible objects remains entirely shut
within itself, unable as yet to feel, to touch, what is there outside
it by way of sense impressions.

In the same way, a
person struggling with knowledge feels himself purely
soul-spiritually (we should not think here of anything material) when
he comes to the kind of place I have just described. In the case of
our rudimentary animal, the organism breaks through to the outer,
sense-perceptible world by its impact with it, differentiating itself
through the sense of touch, by which surfaces are touched and
knowledge gained as to their roughness or smoothness, their warmth or
cold. In the same way, when what has lived only inwardly opens itself
to what is outside, the possibility is acquired to break through, as
it were, just at the places we have described and to acquire a
spiritual sense of touch. Only when a person has wrestled perhaps for
years at these boundaries of cognition, struggling to break through
into the spiritual world, can he first acquire real spiritual organs.
I am speaking only in an elementary way of how this sense of touch is
developed. To use these terms in a more definite way, however, we can
say that by ever greater application of inner work, working away from
being enclosed within oneself, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears
develop. To many people today it still seems absurd to say that at
first the soul is just as undifferentiated an organ as the organism
of a lower animal, forming its senses out of its own substance and
out of this substance developing soul concepts, spiritual organs
differentiated as to their soul qualities, which then bring an
individual face to face with the spiritual world.

It may be said that a
systematically presented spiritual science, which is fully entitled
to be called scientific, is something new in the progress of
knowledge in human evolution. It is not new, however, in every
respect. The struggle for it, the striving after it, is to be seen in
the outstanding individuals of knowledge from the past. I have
referred to one of these when I mentioned Friedrich Theodor Vischer.
I would like to show from his own comments how he stood at such a
border of knowledge, how he remained there, never making the
transition from being inwardly stirred to actually breaking through
the boundary to the spiritual sense of touch. Here I would simply
like to read you a passage from Friedrich Theodor Vischer's works, in
which he describes how he came to such a boundary where the spirit
breaks through into the human soul in the course of his wrestling
with natural scientific knowledge. This was at the time in which
materialistically directed natural science posed many riddles for
those struggling for knowledge in real earnest. Countless people
claimed that the soul cannot be said to be anything but a product of
material activity.

Here are his words:
“No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no
brain — so say our opponents. We reply: There would be no nerve
center, no brain had they not been prepared for by countless stages
from below upward; it is easy to speak mockingly of those who say
that there is an echo of the spirit in granite and limestone. This is
no harder than it would be for us to ask sarcastically how the
protein in the brain rises to the level of ideas. Human knowledge
cannot discriminate between stages. It will remain a mystery how it
comes about that nature, beneath which the spirit must be slumbering,
stands there as such a perfect counter-blow of the spirit that we
bruise ourselves against it.”

Please take note of
how this wrestler for knowledge describes how we bruise ourselves!
Here you have the inner experience of bumping against something by
one who wrestles for knowledge: “It is a forcible separation
with the appearance of such absoluteness that with Hegel's
‘differentiation’ and ‘non-differentiation’
(ingenious as this formula is, though it says as good as nothing) the
steepness of the apparent dividing wall is concealed. One finds the
right appreciation of the cutting edge and the impact of this
counter-blow in Fichte, but no explanation for it,”

Here we have a man's
description of his struggle for knowledge in the time before there
could be a decision, a spiritual scientific decision, not merely to
come to this blow and counter-blow but to break through the dividing
wall into the spiritual world. I can speak about these things only in
principle here; you will find them described in detail in my books.
Particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of
my Occult Science, you will find all the details concerning
what the soul must take upon itself in the way of inner activity and
inner exercise (if I may use the expression) in order really to
transform what is undifferentiated in the soul into spiritual organs
able to behold the spiritual world.

A great deal is
necessary, however, if an individual really wishes to make
investigations on this path. So much is necessary just because in our
age, due to the habits cultivated in the natural scientific sphere,
in the sphere of the natural scientific world view, habits that are
perfectly justified in their own field, a particular way of thinking
has taken root in human life, a way that is opposed to the one
leading to the spiritual world. Thus it goes without saying that from
the side of natural science things are heard that demonstrate an
utter lack of desire to know the actual facts about the spiritual
world.

I will give just one
example (as I have said, you can find more exact information in the
books I have mentioned) of how the human being has to make every
effort to acquire a totally different way of conceiving things. In
ordinary life people are satisfied with concepts, with mental images
of which it may be said that these concepts, these mental images are
such that they offer a likeness to some external fact or object. This
cannot satisfy the spiritual investigator. Even mental images,
concepts, become something totally different in his soul from what
they are due to modern habits of thinking. If I may use another
comparison, I would like to show how the spiritual investigator
stands today in relation to the world. Those who are materialists,
spiritualists, pantheists, individualists, or monadists, and so on,
all believe that in some way they can penetrate the world riddle.
They try with definite mental images, concepts, to reach a picture of
world processes. The spiritual investigator is totally unable to look
on concepts in this way; his attitude toward them must be such that
he is always clearly conscious of how, in a concept, in a mental
image, he has nothing beyond what can be had in the outer sense world
when, for example, one particular side of a tree or some other object
is photographed and then another picture is taken from another side,
from a third side, a fourth side, and so on. The pictures are
different from one another. If combined mentally, they together
present the tree as a formed mental image. But it can easily be said
that one picture contradicts another.

Just consider how
completely different an object looks when photographed from one side
or another. The spiritual I investigator looks at the conceptions of
pantheism, monadism, and so on as if they were simply different ways
of looking at reality. Spiritual reality does not actually reveal
itself at all to the life of mental images, the life of concepts, in
such a way that it is possible to say that any one concept is a
faithful image. We must always go all around the matter, forming
manifold concepts from various sides. By this means we become capable
of developing a much more flexible inner soul life than we are
accustomed to when regarding the outer sense world. By doing this it
becomes necessary to make our concepts far more alive. They are no
longer simply images, but by being experienced they become much more
alive than they are in ordinary life and for the things of ordinary
life.

Perhaps you will
understand me better if I describe it in the following way. Suppose
you have a rose cut from the rose bush; you form your mental image of
it. You are able to form this mental image yourself. You will often
have the feeling about this mental image that it expresses something
real for you, that the rose is something real. The spiritual
investigator can never make any progress if he is satisfied with the
mental image that the rose is something real. Pictured as a blossom
on a short stalk, the rose is not real in itself. It can be real only
when on the rose bush. The rose bush is something real. And the
spiritual investigator must accustom himself to regarding every
individual thing, to remaining conscious in what limited sense an
issue is something real. People form mental images of these things,
believing them to be something real. When the rose is in front of him
on its stalk, the spiritual investigator must feel that it is not
real; he must have a feeling for, an experience of, the degree of
unreality contained in this rose as mere blossom.

By extending this to
our observation of the whole world, however, the conceptual life
itself is renewed, and we do not thereby get the crippled, dead
mental images with which the modern natural scientific world view is
satisfied; we get mental images that are living with the objects. It
is true that in proceeding from the present habits of thinking, we at
first experience a great deal of disappointment, disappointment that
arises because what is experienced in this way differs a great deal
from present habits of thinking. When speaking out of knowledge
acquired in the spiritual world, much has to be said that seems
paradoxical when compared with what is generally said and believed
today.

A person today may be
very learned in the sphere of physics, let us say; he may be an
exceptionally learned person who quite rightly excites admiration by
his erudition; but such an individual may work with clear concepts
that have not been produced nor worked upon in accordance with what I
have described, that is, without endowing the conceptual world with
life. I have said something quite elementary, but this elementary
statement must in the case of the spiritual investigator be extended
over the whole observation of the world. I will offer an example. At
the beginning of the century, Professor Dewar delivered a very
important lecture in London. This lecture could be said to show in
every sentence the great modern scholar who was as well acquainted
with the conceptions of physics as a modern physicist can be. From
his modern conceptions of physics, this scholar seeks to speak about
the final condition of the Earth and about some future condition in
which much of what is present with us today will have died away. He
describes this correctly, because he bases his lecture on really
well-founded hypotheses: he describes how one day after millions of
years a condition of the earth will have to arise in which a great
drop in temperature will occur; this can be well calculated, and this
drop in temperature will bring about changes in certain substances.
This can be calculated, and he describes how milk, for example, will
not be able to maintain its fluid condition but will become solid;
how the white of an egg smeared on a wall will become so luminous
that people will be able to read a newspaper by its light alone,
since so much light will come from the white of an egg; and many
other such details are described. The consistency of things that can
sustain hardly any weight today will be materially strengthened so
that hundreds of pounds will be able to be supported by them. In
short, Professor Dewar gives an imposing picture of the future
condition of the earth. From the standpoint of physics there is
nothing at all to be said against it, but for anyone who has taken
living thinking into his soul, the matter has another aspect. When he
turns to the conceptual forms of the kind given by the Professor, an
example enters his mind that in its methods and manner of approach is
very similar to the Professor's deductions and way of thinking.

Suppose, for example,
we were to take a man of twenty-five and observe exactly how certain
organs, the stomach for example, change from year to year in the
course of two, three, four, five years (today such an observation can
be managed; I need only remind you of X-rays). They take on different
configurations. We can describe this in the same way that the
physicist does when he compares successive conditions of the earth
and then calculates what the earth will look like after millions of
years. This can also be done in the case of the human being. The
changes in the stomach or heart, for example, are observed, and a
calculation then made of how this man will look after perhaps 200
years according to these alterations. We get just as well-founded a
result if it is calculated what this man will look like after 200
years by taking into account all the individual perceptions. The only
thing is that the man will have died long before this! He will no
longer be there.

You see what I mean.
What is important here is that in a particular case we know from
direct experience that calculations of this kind do not correspond
with reality, because, when 200 years have passed, the human body
with its transformations will no longer be there; yet this same kind
of calculation is made in connection with the earth. No heed is paid
to the fact that after two million years the earth as a physical
being will have been dead for a long time, will no longer be there.
Thus the whole learned calculation about this condition has no value
at all as a reality, because the reality it is applied to will no
longer be there.

These matters are very
far-reaching. In the case of the human being you can just as well
calculate backward as forward; you might, in accordance with the
small changes taking place in two years, calculate how a man looked
200 years ago, but he was not there then either! With this same
method, however, the Kant-LaPlace theory was formulated. This theory
assumes that there was once a condition of fog, a calculation that
was based on our present condition. The calculation is entirely
correct, the perceptions are good enough; it is just that the
spiritual investigator becomes aware that at the time this primeval
fog was supposed to be there, the earth was not yet born. The entire
solar system did not yet exist.

I wanted to bring
these calculations to your notice to show you how the entire inner
life of soul must be raised out of abstractions, how it must immerse
itself in a living reality, how mental images themselves must be
living. In my book,
The Riddle of Human Being, I have made a distinction between
conceptions corresponding to reality and those corresponding to
unreality. To put the matter briefly, the spiritual investigator must
point out that his path is such that the means of knowledge that he
uses must first be awakened, that he must transform his soul before
being able to look into the spiritual world. Then the results take on
a form enabling one to see that the spiritual investigator is not
speculating as to the immortality of the soul or whether the soul
goes through birth and death. His path of investigation leads him to
the eternal in the human soul, to what goes through birth and death;
the path shows him what lives as the eternal in the human being. He
therefore seeks out the object, the thing, the being itself. If we
reach the being, we can recognize its characteristics just as
we recognize the color of a rose.

Hence it often appears
as if the spiritual investigator were asserting that such-and-such is
so. For when he presents evidence he must always indicate by what
path he arrived at these things. He has to begin where the other
science ends. Then, however, a real penetration is possible into
spheres that may be said to take death as their starting point, just
as natural scientific spheres take their start from birth and youth.
We must simply be clear that this death is in no way merely the final
event, as it is ordinarily regarded from the viewpoint of outer sense
perception. It is rather something that has its part in existence in
the same way that the forces called into life with birth have their
part in existence. We do not meet death only through its taking hold
of us as a one-time event; we carry the forces of death in us —
destructive forces, forces that are continually destroying —
just as we carry in us the forces of birth, the constructive forces
that are given to us at birth.

To have real insight
into this we have to be able to pursue research at a boundary between
natural science and spiritual science. Today I am only able to cite
the results of such research, of course; I only wish to arouse your
interest. Were I to go into all the details of what I am suggesting,
I would have to offer many lectures. If an individual is to pursue
what has been suggested here, he must approach a boundary between
natural science and spiritual science. It is widely believed today,
and has been believed for some time, that the human nervous system,
the human nerve apparatus, is simply an instrument of thinking,
feeling, and willing, in short, an instrument for soul experiences,
(Science today has for the most part gone beyond this belief, but the
world view of the general public usually remains at the standpoint
abandoned by science some decades before.) An individual who develops
the soul organs — the eyes of the spirit, the ears of the
spirit — as I have described at least in principle, comes to
recognize the life of the soul.

Whoever really
discovers this soul life knows that to call the brain an instrument
of our thinking is much the same as to maintain the following. Let us
say that I am walking over ground that has become sodden, and in it I
leave my footprints. These footprints are found by someone else, who
then wishes to explain them. How does he do this? He assumes that
underneath in the earth all kinds of forces are surging up and down,
and because they surge in this way they produce these footprints. Of
course the forces in the earth have nothing to do with the fact that
these footprints have been produced, for I myself left them there,
but the traces I left can now be reflected upon. This is the way that
physiologists today explain what goes on in the brain, what
originates in the brain, because all thinking, all mental activity
and feeling correspond to something in the nervous system. Just as my
tracks correspond with my footsteps, so something actually in the
brain corresponds with the impressions of the soul; but the soul has
first to leave its imprint there. The earth is just as little an
organ for my walking or footprints as the brain is the organ for
processes of thinking or mental activity. And just as I cannot walk
around without firm ground (I cannot walk on air, I need ground if I
want to walk) so the brain is necessary; this is not, however,
because it calls forth the soul element but because the soul element
needs ground and footing upon which it expresses itself during the
time that the human being is living in the body between birth and
death. It therefore has nothing to do with all that.

The brilliantly
intellectual natural science of today will come to full clarity when
this revolution in thinking comes about to which I have referred
here. This revolution is more radical than the transition to the
Copernican world view from the world view held previously. In face of
the real world view, however, it is as justifiable as the Copernican
world view was in relation to what preceded it. When we have pressed
forward on the path of investigation of the soul, we will find that
the processes in the brain, in the nervous system, that correspond to
the soul life are not constructive. They are not there so that the
productive, growing, flourishing activity is present in the nervous
system as it is in the rest of the organism. No! What the soul brings
about in the nervous system is a destructive activity. During our
waking consciousness outside sleep it is a destructive activity.

Only by virtue of the
fact that our nervous system is inserted within us in such a way that
it receives constant refreshment from the rest of the organism can
there be constant compensation for the destructive, dissolving,
disintegrating activity introduced into our nervous system by
thinking. Destructive activity is there, activity qualitatively of
the same nature as what the human being goes through when he dies,
when the organism is completely dissolved. In our mental activity
death is living in us continually. You might say that death lives in
us continually, distributed atomistically, and that the one-time
death that lays hold of us at the end of life is only the summation
of what is continually working in us destructively. It is true that
this is compensated for, but the compensation is such that in the end
spontaneous death is evoked.

We must understand
death as a force working in the organism, just as we understand the
life forces. Look today at natural science, so thoroughly justified
in its own sphere, and you will find that it looks only for the
constructive forces; what is destructive eludes it. Hence external
natural science is unable to observe what arises anew out of the
destruction, not in this case of the body, for the bodily nature is
destroyed, but of a soul and spiritual nature, now constructive. This
aspect is always lost to observation, being accessible only to the
kind of observation I have previously described. Then it becomes
evident that, having meanwhile brought our life to this point, the
whole activity of our soul does not work only in conjunction with the
ground on which it has to develop and which, indeed, it acts upon
destructively (in so far as the soul forms mental images, in so far
as it is active); instead, the whole of our soul activity is attuned
to a spiritual world always around us, in which we stand with our
soul-spiritual element just as we stand in the physical,
sense-perceptible world with our physical body. Spiritual science is
thus striving for a real connection of the human being to the
spiritual world that permeates everything physical to the actual,
concrete, real spiritual world.

Then the possibility
truly arises for a more far-reaching observation of how what is
working and weaving within us as soul, working destructively within
the limits I described, is a homogeneous whole. What I have called
the development of the soul presses on from ordinary consciousness to
clairvoyant consciousness. I have spoken about this in my book,
The Riddle of Human Being. This clairvoyant consciousness creates
the possibility of possessing Imaginative knowledge. This Imaginative
knowledge does not yield what belongs to the outwardly perceptible;
it yields to the human being himself (I would like to look away from
the other world for the moment) what is not perceptible to his
senses. To avoid misunderstanding I recently called what can be
perceived at first by an awakened knowledge of this kind the body
of formative forces. This is the super-sensible body of the human
being, which is active throughout the whole course of our life, from
birth, or let us say, conception, until our physical death. It also
bears our memories, yet it stands in connection with a super-sensible
entity, with a super-sensible outer world.

Thus, our sense life
with the rest of its consciousness is there as a mere island, but
around this island and even permeating it we have the relationship of
the human body of formative forces to the super-sensible outer world.
Here, it is true, we reach the point of bringing the whole conceptual
world (not any different now from the way I have described it) into
connection with the physical brain that provides the ground for all
this; but we arrive at the insight that the body of formative forces
is the carrier of human thoughts, that thoughts develop in this body
of formative forces and that in thinking the human being lives in
this body of formative forces.

It is different if we
go on to another experience of the soul, namely to feeling. Our
feeling, our emotions, our passions, stand in a different
relationship to our life of soul from that of our thinking. The
spiritual investigator finds that the thoughts we usually have are
bound up with the body of formative forces. This does not apply,
however, to our feelings, our emotions. Feelings and emotions live in
us in a much more subconscious way. Thus they are connected with
something far more all-encompassing than our life between birth and
death. It is not as though the human being is without thoughts in the
part of his life about which I am now speaking; all feelings are
permeated by thoughts. But the thoughts by which feelings are
permeated do not, as a rule, enter man's ordinary consciousness. They
remain beneath the threshold of this consciousness. What surges up as
feeling is penetrated by thoughts, but these thoughts are more
far-reaching, for they are found only when an individual progresses
in clairvoyant cognition, when he progresses to what I call the
Inspired consciousness (I am not thinking of superstitious
conceptions here). You may study the particulars of this in my
books.

If we go deeply into
what is actually sleeping in regard to ordinary Consciousness (in the
same way that from going to sleep to awaking a person sleeps in
regard to the ordinary images of the senses) we see that it surges up
just as dreams surge up into our sleep. Feelings actually surge up
from the innermost depths of the soul; it sounds strange, but it is
so. But this deeper region of the soul that is accessible to Inspired
knowledge is what lives between death and a new birth. It is what
enters into connection with the physical through our being conceived
or born, what goes through the portal of death and has a spiritual
existence among other conditions until the human being is reborn.
Whoever really looks into what is living in the world of feeling with
Inspired knowledge sees the human being not only between birth and
death but also during the time the soul undergoes between death and a
new birth.

The matter is not
quite so simple as this, however; it is indeed like this, but it is
also shown how forces arise in the soul that make it possible to look
upon the feelings, emotions, passions, that make it possible to live
in them. Just as in the plant we see what has arisen through the
forces of the seed, so we see something that has not arisen with our
birth or conception but that has emerged from a spiritual world.

I know very well how
many objections can be made to a conception of this kind by those who
accept the natural scientific world view. Those who are familiar with
this world view will find it easy to say, “Here he comes and
like a dilettante describes how the aspects of the soul he wishes to
encompass come from a spiritual world; he even describes their
special configurations, the colors of the feelings and so on, as if,
on the one hand, there were hints in these feelings concerning our
life before birth and, on the other hand, something in these feelings
that is like the seed of the plant, which will become the plant of
the next year. Doesn't this man know,” people will say,
“about the wonderful laws of heredity presented by natural
science? Is he ignorant of everything that those who created the
science of hereditary characteristics have brought about?”

Even if the facts
indicated by natural science are entirely correct, it is nevertheless
the case that concealed in the emergence of heredity are the forces
through which we have been preparing ourselves for centuries and
which we ourselves send down. From grandparents and parents,
constellations are built up that finally lead to the material result
with which we then sheathe ourselves when we leave the spiritual
world to descend into the physical. Whoever really keeps in mind the
wonderful results of modern research into heredity will find that
what spiritual science finds out about the soul (yet in a quite
different way, it might be said, in the entirely opposite way) will
be fully confirmed by natural science, whereas what natural science
itself says is definitely not confirmed in the least by natural
science. I can only suggest this here. When we then enter the sphere
referred to as that of the will, this totally eludes the contents of
man's ordinary consciousness. What does a person know about the
processes going on in him when the thought, I want something, shapes
itself into a movement of the hand? The actual process of willing is
asleep in the human being. Regarding the feelings and emotions it
could at least be said that the human being dreams within the human
being. This is the reason that the question of freedom is so
difficult, because the will is sleeping in relation to the higher
consciousness. We come to knowledge about what is going on in the
will in clairvoyant consciousness only by reaching the stage of
actual Intuitive consciousness. By this I do not mean the vague,
everyday consciousness called intuitive, but rather what I refer to
in my writings as one of the three stages: Imaginative, Inspired, and
Intuitive cognition.

Here we come into the
sphere of the will, into the realm that is supposed to live and work
within us. This must first be drawn out of the deep regions of the
soul. Then we find, however, that this element of the will is also
permeated by thoughts, by the spiritual (in addition, the ordinary
thought stands by itself). But in bearing the will within us, there
works into this will something in addition to what we have
experienced in the spiritual world in our feelings, working between
death and a new birth. Something is active there that we have
experienced in the preceding life on earth. The impulses of earlier
earthly lives work into the will nature of the human being. In what
we develop or what we cultivate in our present willing live the
impulses for our lives on earth to come. For real spiritual science,
then, the whole of human life separates into the lives lying between
birth and death and those which, because all physical existence has
to be built up out of the world, are experienced in far longer
periods in the spiritual world. Out of such lives, out of repeated
earthly lives, repeated spiritual lives, the complete human life is
composed. This is not some fantasy, it is not a capricious thought,
but rather something we find when we learn to turn the eye of the
spirit to the eternal, the imperishable, in the human soul.

These things do not
preclude human freedom. If I build a house this year in which I will
live for the next two years, I will be a free man in this house
despite having built it for myself. Human freedom is not precluded by
this. One earthly life determines the other that follows. Only
through a lack of understanding could this be represented as an
infringement on the idea of human freedom.

Thus, in spiritual
investigation by making death our point of departure, we gradually
arrive at the spiritual facts. If in spiritual investigation one
makes death the foundation, just as physical investigation is based
on birth and embryonic life, this observation reveals the most varied
things in individual detail. I will point to something specific here,
because I would not like to remain with the indefinite but rather to
quote concrete results of anthroposophical research. In the ordinary
life of the spirit we are able to differentiate between the forcible
entry of death due to an external cause and death that comes from
within through illness or by reason of old age. We are therefore able
to distinguish two different kinds of death.

Spiritual
investigation that goes concretely into the nature of death discovers
the following. Let us take as an example the entrance into life of
violent death, be it through accident or some other cause. The
entrance of such an event brings about an end to life in this earthly
existence. The development of spirit consciousness for the spiritual
world after death depends on this one-time entrance of death, just as
the consciousness we are able to develop in life depends on the
forces given us at birth (in the way that I have described). The
Consciousness we develop after death is of a different kind. The
consciousness developed here on earth stands on the ground of the
nervous system, just as when I walk around on the ground my
foundation is the ground. In the spiritual world the consciousness
after death has different foundations, but it is definitely a
consciousness. If a man dies a violent death this is not something
that merely lays hold of his mental images. The mental activity of
ordinary consciousness ceases with death, and another Consciousness
begins, but this lays hold of his will which, as we have seen, passes
over into the next earthly life. The spiritual investigator possesses
the means to investigate what can arise in an earthly life if, in a
previous earthly life, there has been a violent death.

Now when we speak of
such things today, people will obviously condemn this way of speaking
as foolish, childish, fantastic. Yet the results are attained just as
scientifically (and it is only such results that I present) as the
results of natural science. If a violent death intervenes in a life,
it shows itself in the following life on earth, where its effect
produces some kind of change of direction at a definite period in
that life. Research is now being done concerning the soul life, but
as a rule only the most external things are taken into consideration.
In many human lives, at a particular moment, something enters that
changes a person's whole destiny, bringing him into a different path
in life in response to inner demands. In America they call these
things “conversions,” wanting to have a name for such
events, but we do not always need to think in terms of religion. A
person on another path of life may be forced into a permanent change
of the direction of his will. Such a radical change of the direction
of his will has its origin in the violent death of his previous life.
Concrete investigation reveals the tremendous importance of what
happens at death for the middle of the next life. If death comes
spontaneously from within through illness or old age, then it has
more significance for the life between death and a new birth than for
the next earthly life.

I would like to offer
the following example so that you may see that I am not speaking
about anything vague here. In fact, I am speaking about details
arising in life's conditions that can be gained by definite
perceptions. Spiritual investigation, which is something new even for
those convinced of the immortality of the human soul, makes us aware
that we must not speak in merely a general way about immortality.
Instead, by grasping the eternal in the human soul, human life as
such becomes comprehensible. All the strange processes that are
observable if we have a sense for the course taken by the soul life,
for the course of the soul life in the human being, all the wonderful
events find their place if we know we are dealing with repeated
earthly lives and repeated spiritual lives. In the spiritual world (I
say this merely parenthetically) the human being lives with spiritual
beings — not only other human beings who are closely connected
with him by destiny and have also passed through the portal of death,
but with other spiritual beings to whom he is related in the same way
that on earth the human being is related to three kingdoms: the
mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The spiritual investigator
speaks of particular individual spirits, particular individual
spiritual beings, belonging to a concrete, individualized spiritual
world, just as here we speak of individualized plant beings, animal
beings, and human beings, in so far as they are physical beings
between birth and death. It can be shattering to people when
knowledge itself approaches the human soul in a totally different
way. It is difficult to speak about these things so that they arise
out of the dim depths of the spirit in a new way.

From what I have said
you will have seen that knowledge about the spiritual world can be
acquired. This knowledge has profound significance for the human
soul; it makes the soul something different, as it were. It lays hold
of the life of the soul, regardless of whether one is a spiritual
investigator or has merely heard and understood the results of
spiritual investigation and has absorbed them. It is of no importance
whether or not one does the research oneself; the result can be
comprehensible just the same. Everything can be understood if we
penetrate it with sufficient depth. We only need to have absorbed it.
Then, however, when we have grasped it in its full essence, it enters
the human soul life in such a way that one day it becomes more
significant than all the other events of life.

A person may have
difficulties, sorrows, that have shattered him, or joy that has
elevated him, or some truly sublime experience. It is not necessary
to be indifferent to such experiences to be a spiritual investigator,
someone who knows the spirit; one can participate as fully with the
feelings as other people do who are not investigators of the spirit.
But when someone penetrates with his essential being into what is
given the soul by spirit knowledge, and when he becomes capable of
answering the question, “What are the effects upon the soul of
these spiritual results?” — when a full answer is given
to the question of what the soul has become through this spiritual
knowledge, then this event becomes more important than anything else
in destiny, more important than any of the other experiences of
destiny that approach the human being. Not that the others become
less significant, but this one becomes greater than the others.
Knowledge itself then enters through the human soul life in
accordance with destiny. If knowledge thus enters through the human
soul life, he begins to understand human destiny as such. From this
knowledge comes the light that illumines human destiny.

From this moment on,
an individual can say this: that if one has this experience of
destiny so purely in the spiritual in this way, it becomes clear how
one is placed into life in accordance with destiny, how our destiny
hangs on threads spun out of previous lives, previous earthly lives
and lives between death and a new birth, which again spin themselves
out of this life and into a following life. Such an individual goes
on to say that ordinary consciousness only dreams through its
destiny; ordinary consciousness endures its destiny without
understanding it, just as one endures a dream. Clairvoyant
consciousness to which one awakes, just as we awake from a dream to
ordinary consciousness, acquires a new relationship to destiny.
Destiny is recognized as taking part in all that our life embraces,
in the life that goes through all our births and deaths.

This matter should not
be grasped in a trivial way, as if the spiritual investigator were to
say, “You yourself are the cause of your own misfortune.”
That would simply betray a misunderstanding and would even be a
slander of spiritual investigation. A misfortune may not have its
source at all in the previous life. It may arise spontaneously and
have its consequences only in the life to follow and also in the life
between earthly lives. We can see again and again that out of
misfortune, out of pain and suffering, emerges a consciousness of a
very different form in the spiritual world, Meaning enters the whole
of our life, however, when we learn to understand our destiny, which
otherwise we only dream our way through.

One thing particularly
stands out when we bear in mind this knowledge of the spirit. We can
no longer say, “If, after death, the soul enters another life,
we can wait until this happens. Here we take life as it is offered us
in the physical body; we can wait for what comes after death.”
The matter is a question of consciousness. We may be sure that what
happens after death is connected with the life we undergo in the
body. Just as in a certain sense we have the Consciousness of our
ordinary waking condition by means of our body, so after death we
have a Consciousness that is no longer spatial, no longer built up
out of the nervous system, but built up out of what has to do with
time, built up out of looking backward.

Just as our nervous
system in a way is the buttress and counterpart to our ordinary
consciousness between birth and death, so our consciousness in the
spiritual world between death and a new birth is founded on what
takes place here in our consciousness Just as here we have the world
around us, so when we are dead we have before us our life as the
significant organ. Hence, a great deal depends upon our consciousness
in the physical body, which is able to extend into the consciousness
we have after death. An individual may be occupied exclusively with
physical conceptions grasped by the senses, as often happens in the
habitual thinking of the present time; he may take into his
consciousness and also in his capacity of memory, in everything
playing itself out in his soul, concerns exclusively having to do
with ordinary life. Such an individual, however, is also building up
a world for himself after death! The environment there is built out
of what a person is inwardly. A person born physically in Europe
cannot see America around him, and just as he receives what he is
born into physically as his environment, so to a certain extent he
determines the environment, the place of his existence, through what
he has built up in his body.

Let us take an extreme
case, though one unlikely to happen. Let us take the case of someone
who fights against all super-sensible conceptions, who has become an
atheist, someone who doesn't even have any inclination to occupy
himself with religion. Now I know that I am saying something
paradoxical here, but it is based on good foundations
anthroposophically: such an individual condemns himself to remaining
in the earthly sphere with his consciousness, whereas another
individual who has absorbed spiritual conceptions is transposed to a
spiritual environment. The one who has absorbed only
sense-perceptible conceptions condemns himself to remaining in the
sense-perceptible environment.

Now we can work
properly in the physical body because our physical body is, as it
were, a sheath protecting us against the environment. And though we
can thus work properly in the physical body when we are present in
the physical world, we cannot do so if we hold to the physical world
after death. We become destructive if we have physical conceptions in
our consciousness after death. In speaking of the problem of
heredity, I intimated how, when the human being is in the spiritual
world, his forces lay hold of the physical world. Whoever condemns
himself, by reason of his merely physical consciousness, to hold to
the physical world becomes the center of destructive forces that lay
hold of what is happening in human life and in the rest of universal
life. As long as we are in the body, we are only able to have
thoughts based on the sense-perceptible, we are able to have only
materialistic thoughts: the body is a defense.

But how much greater a
defense than we imagine! It seems strange, but to anyone who
perceives the spiritual world in all its connections, one thing is
clear: if an individual were not shut off from the surrounding world
by his senses, if the senses were not curbed so that in ordinary
consciousness he is incapable of taking up living concepts but takes
up only those that are lifeless and designed to prevent him from
penetrating into the spiritual environment, if an individual were
able to make his conceptions active directly and did not have them
merely within him after things have already passed through the
senses, then even here in the physical world, if he were to develop
his conceptual life, his conceptions would have crippling, deadening
effects. For these conceptions are in a certain way destructive of
everything they lay hold of. Only because they are held back in us
are those conceptions kept from being destructive. They destroy only
when they come to expression in machines, in tools, which are also
something dead taken from living nature. This indeed is only a
picture, but one corresponding with a reality. If an individual
enters the spiritual world with merely physical conceptions, he
becomes a center of destruction.

Thus I have to bring a
conception to your attention as an example of many others: we should
not say that we can wait until after death, because it depends on a
person's nature whether he develops conceptions of the sense world or
of the super-sensible world, whether he prepares for his next life in
this way or that. The next life is indeed a very different one, but
it is evolved from our life here. This is the essential thing that
has to be comprehended. In spiritual science, we encounter something
different from what is surmised. For this reason I must still make a
few remarks in closing.

The belief might
easily arise that anyone now entering the spiritual world must
unconditionally become a spiritual investigator himself. This is not
necessarily so, although in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described much of
how the soul must transform itself in order really to be able to
enter. And to a certain degree, everyone is able to do this today,
but it need not be everyone. What a person develops regarding the
soul element is a purely intimate concern; what arises from it,
however, is the formation of concepts of the investigated truths.
What the spiritual investigator can give is clothed in conceptions
such as I have developed today. Then it can be shared. For what a
person needs, it is quite immaterial whether things are investigated
by himself or whether he accepts them from some other credible
source. I am speaking here from a law of spiritual investigation. It
is not important to investigate the things oneself. What is important
is for us to have them within us, for us to have developed them
within. Hence, we are in error if we believe that everyone has to
become a spiritual investigator.

Today, however, the
spiritual investigator has the obligation (as I myself have had the
obligation) to render an account, as it were, of his path of
research. This is due not only to the fact that everyone today can,
to a certain extent, follow the path I have described without harm,
but it is also because everyone is justified in asking, “How
have you arrived at these results?” This is why I have
described these things. I believe that even those who have no wish to
become spiritual investigators will at least want to be convinced of
how spiritual investigators arrive at the results that everyone needs
today, the results of those who wish to lay the foundation for the
life which must develop in human souls for human evolution today.

The time is now over
during which, in ancient times, so much was held back regarding
spiritual research that brought about the evolution of the soul. In
those ancient times, to impart what was hidden was strictly
forbidden. Even today, those who know of these mysteries of life (of
which there are not just a few) still hold these things back. Whoever
has learned about these things merely as a student from another
teacher does not under any circumstances do well to pass them on.
Today it is advisable to pass on only what an individual himself has
discovered, the results only of his own investigations. These,
however, can and must be put at the service of the rest of
humanity.

Already from the few
brief indications I was able to give today it can become evident what
spiritual investigation can mean for the individual human being, but
it is not only significant for the individual. And in order to
address this other aspect in closing with at least a few words I
would like to point to something that is taken into consideration
only a little today. There is a curious phenomenon to which I would
like to direct your attention in the following way. In the second
half of the nineteenth century we have seen the rise of a certain
natural scientific orientation: the explanation of living beings
connected with the name Darwin. Enthusiastic scholarly investigators,
enthusiastic students have carried these things through the second
half of the nineteenth century. Maybe I have already remarked upon
the occurrence of a curious fact. Already in the 1860's, under the
guidance of Haeckel, there developed a powerful movement based on a
world view. This movement wanted to overthrow everything old and to
restructure the entire world view in accordance with Darwinistic
concepts. Today there are still numerous people who emphasize how
great and significant it would be if there were no longer a
wisdom-filled world-guidance but instead if the evolution of
everything could be explained out of mechanical forces in the sense
of Darwinism.

In 1867 Eduard von
Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious
(Philosophie des Unbewussten) and turned against the purely
external view of the world represented by Darwinism. He pointed to
the necessity of inner forces, although he did so in an inadequate
way, in a philosophical way (he did not yet have spiritual science).
Naturally those who were enthusiastic about the rise of Darwinism
were ready to say, “That philosopher is simply a dilettante; we
don't need to pay any attention to him.” Counterattacks
appeared in which the “dilettante” Eduard von Hartmann
was ridiculed and which asserted that the true, educated natural
scientist need not pay any attention to such things.

Then there appeared a
publication by Anonymous, which brilliantly argued against the
publication of Eduard von Hartmann. The natural scientists who all
thought as they did were in full agreement with this publication
because Eduard von Hartmann was completely contradicted in it.
Everything that could possibly be gathered from the basis of natural
science was there used by the anonymous author against Eduard von
Hartmann just as today so much is brought up against spiritual
science. This publication was received very favorably. Haeckel said,
“For once a real natural scientist has written against this
dilettante, Eduard von Hartmann; here one can see what a natural
scientist is able to do. I myself could write no better. Let him
identify himself and we will consider him as one of us.” To
state it briefly, the natural scientists spread a lot of propaganda
in relation to this publication, which they welcomed highly because
it solidified their position. The publication was very soon sold out,
and a second edition became necessary. There the author revealed
himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann!

In that instance
someone taught the world a necessary lesson. Whoever writes about
spiritual science today and reads what is written against it could
without much effort invent everything that is brought against
spiritual science. Eduard von Hartmann was able himself to make all
the objections that the natural scientists made against him —
and he did so.

But I mention this
only in introduction to my main point. Oskar Hertwig is one of the
most important students of Haeckel who entered upon the industrious,
reliable, and great path of natural scientific investigation. Last
year Hertwig published a very beautiful book, The Evolution of the
Organism. A Rebuttal to Darwin's Theory of Chance (Das Werden der
Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie). In this
book he points to issues that were already raised by Eduard von
Hartmann. Such a matter is pretty much without precedent: already the
generation immediately following, which still grew up under the
master, had to get away from something that had been believed could
build a whole world view; it had even been believed that it could
provide elucidation of the spiritual world. A good Darwinist
contradicts Darwinism! But he does still more, and that is what is
actually important to me.

Oskar Hertwig writes
at the conclusion of his superb and beautiful book that the kind of
world view that Darwinism represented does not stand there merely as
a theoretical edifice; rather it intervenes in the totality of life,
encompassing also what people do, will, feel, and think. He says,
“The interpretation of Darwin's teaching, which because of its
vagueness can have such varied meanings, permitted also a very varied
application to other realms of economic, social, and political life.
It was possible, just as it was from the Delphic Oracles, to use what
was said as desired for specific applications to social, political,
health-related, medical, and other questions and to support one's own
assertions by basing them on the Darwinistically restructured biology
with its immutable natural laws. If these supposed laws are not
actually laws, however, could there not exist social dangers —
because of their many-sided application in other realms? We had
better not believe that human society can for centuries use
expressions like, ‘a struggle for existence,’
‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘the most
suitable,’ ‘the most useful,’ ‘perfection by
selection,’ etc., applying them to the most varied realms of
life, using these expressions like daily bread, without influencing
in a deep and lasting way the entire direction of idea formation! The
proof for this assertion could easily be demonstrated in many
contemporary phenomena. For this very reason the decision concerning
the truth or error of Darwinism reaches far beyond the confines of
the biological sciences.”

What arises in such a
theory shows itself everywhere in life. Then a question arises from
the realm of spiritual science that also intervenes in life. We live
today in a sad time, in a tragic time for humanity. It is a time that
has developed out of human conceptions, out of human ideas. Whoever
studies interrelationships with the help of spiritual science knows
about the connection of what we encounter externally today with what
humanity is now tragically experiencing. A great deal is being
experienced; people believe that they can encompass reality with
their concepts, but they do not encompass it. And because they do not
encompass it, because with natural scientific concepts reality can
never be encompassed, reality grows over their head and shows them
that human beings can take part in such events but that the result is
the chaos by which we are surrounded today.

Spiritual science does
not arise only through an inner necessity, though this is also true.
It would have arisen through this inner necessity even if the outer
events did not stand there as a mighty, powerful sign. Such signs are
there, however, from the other side: that the old world views are
great in the natural sciences but can never intervene formatively in
the social, legislative, political spheres in the world, that reality
grows beyond human beings, if that is what they want. These mighty
signs point to the need for spiritual science, which seeks concepts
that correspond with reality, concepts derived from reality and that
are therefore also capable of carrying the world in the social and
political realms. No matter how much one believes that the concepts
customary outside spiritual science today will enable us to emerge
out of the chaos, it will not happen; for within the reality the
spirit prevails. And because the human being himself intervenes with
his actions in this reality, in the social, in the political life, he
requires the conceptions, the feelings, the will impulses that are
drawn from the spirit in order to come to fruitful concepts in these
realms. In the future politics and social science will need something
for which only spiritual science can provide the foundation. This is
what is particularly important for contemporary history.

In this lecture, which
has already been long enough, I can only hope to offer a few
impulses. I only wish to point out that what appears today as
spiritual science in a systematic order is wanted by the best. If it
were only up to me, I would not give a special name to this spiritual
science. For more than thirty years I have been working on the
greater and greater elaboration of the conceptions regarding reality
that Goethe acquired in his magnificent theory of metamorphosis, in
which he had already attempted to make the concept living as opposed
to dead. At that time this was only possible in an elementary way. if
one does not consider Goethe simply as a historical figure, however,
if one considers him still as a contemporary, then today the Goethean
teaching of metamorphosis transforms itself into what I call living
concepts, which then find their way into spiritual science.
Goetheanism is the term I would most like to use for what I mean by
spiritual scientific investigation, because it is based on sound
foundations of a grasp of reality as Goethe wanted it.

And the building in
Dornach that is to be dedicated to this spiritual investigation, and
through which this spiritual investigation has become more well known
than it would have without the building, I would like most to call
the Goetheanum, so that one would see that what arises as spiritual
investigation today stands fully in the midst of the healthy process
of the evolution of humanity. Certainly many today who wish to
acknowledge the Goethean way of looking at the world will still say
that Goethe was one who recognized nature as the highest above all
and who also permitted the spirit to emerge out of nature. Already as
a very young man, Goethe said, “Gedacht hat sie und sinnt
bestaendig” (“She did think and ponders
incessantly”), ponders incessantly although not as man but as
nature. Even if one is a spiritual investigator one can agree with
the kind of naturalism that, like Goethe, thinks of nature as
permeated by spirit. And those who always believe that one must stop
at the boundaries of knowledge, that one can't get any further there,
can be repudiated with Goethe's words. Permit me, therefore, as I
conclude here, to add the words that Goethe used concerning another
accomplished investigator who represented the later Kantian view:

Into the inner being of nature
—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!

Next to these words Goethe placed
others that show how well Goethe knew that when the human being
awakes the spirit within himself, he also finds the spirit in the
world and himself as spirit:

Into the inner being of nature
—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!
This I hear repeated for sixty years
And damn it but secretly —
Nature has neither core nor shell,
She is everything at once.
Above all simply examine yourself
To see whether you yourself are core or shell!

Spiritual science
wishes to work toward the human being learning to examine himself as
to whether he is core or shell. And he is core if he grasps himself
in his full reality. If he grasps himself as core, then he also
penetrates to the spirit of nature. Then in the evolution of humanity
in relation to spiritual science something occurs that is similar to
when Copernicus pointed from the visible to the invisible, even of
this visible itself.

For the super-sensible,
however, humanity will have to stir itself to grasp this
super-sensible within itself. To do this one does not need to become a
spiritual investigator. One needs, however, to remove all prejudices
that place themselves before the soul if one wishes to understand
what spiritual science intends to say out of such a Goethean
attitude.

I wished to offer
today only a few impulses to stimulate you further. From this point
of view it is always possible at least to stimulate something, but if
one wanted to go into all the details, many lectures would be needed.
But I believe these few comments will have sufficed to show that
something needs to be drawn out of the evolutionary process of
humanity, something that will first awaken the soul to full life. No
one needs to believe that this will shrivel the soul, that it will
kill off anything, not even the religious life. As Goethe said:

Whoever possesses Science and Art,
Has also Religion,
Whoever possesses neither of the two,
Had better have Religion!

So one can say, as the
modern way of thinking is evolving, whoever finds spiritual
scientific paths will also find the way to true religious life;
whoever does not find the spiritual scientific path will be in danger
of losing also the religious path so necessary for the future of
humanity!